Night ShiftRecent work byRobert Hinchley

Artguise

Partially hidden under a well-worn lumberjack shirt, Rob Hinchley's dreamcoat is an old acrylic striped sweater, splattered with smears, the occasional handprint and blobs of oil paint. He's only wearing paint-free jeans because, as he said earlier, his shorts are "past it". A small but eclectic group of plastic jars and paint brushes, a palette, and an old plastic Loblaws bag stuffed with paint tubes, some squeezed in the middle, compare paint globs and streaks nearby.

At the corner of Gladstone and Bank Street, I'm observing an artist at work in the only studio that matters much to him—the street.

This is no urban legend. This is painter, Rob Hinchley, on the night shift.

"For a long time, I found it difficult to think about painting in the city, even though I live here," says Hinchley. It's difficult to believe. Within moments of dropping to the pavement, Hinchley sinks into the scene and the picture he's creating as if it's all wet concrete.

"I'd think of the beauty of the sky and sun and the moon reflecting in the water. I thought about the transition to street lights and car lights and the reflections of window lights in the (wet) sidewalk," he says. "In the country it wasn't as readily available. Now I just walk out down the street, and it's all there. This is where I am. This is where I spend my time," he observes. He got tired of being a "weekend painter," doing his day job and waiting five days to get to the country and paint. "It (painting the city) brings an honesty to the work. Your everyday situations - that's where I wanted to bring my work."

"I really don't go out and focus on a location until I get tired or find somewhere that looks good," says Hinchley. Each night shift begins with a walk. Sometimes he walks more than he paints. Sometimes he doesn't paint at all. "It's about putting myself into... feeling the pavement under my feet and the wetness of the puddles - that's important to the overall feeling of the work. Process is probably the best word for it. It's part of the process."

"You get very focused on your work. I could hear some water near me." Hinchley recalls an incident during a recent night shift. "I turned around, and there's this guy peeing beside me! People are very curious about what you're doing. When you're out painting, you attract a lot of attention." Hinchley stays calm and low key, regardless of what happens.

Painted on wood and canvas in oils, the collection, all made within the last 6 months or so, ranges in size from the relatively tiny, roughly 10" square, "Red Light," to the substantially larger, "Late Rain," about 45" x 30".

Thick smearing paint strata, built up like layers of city grime, form backdrops to giant globules of deep paint, creating a kind of physical map of mountainous terrain. The edges of the primary colours Hinchley uses, brushed and manually manipulated, metamorphose into the slate blue used in uniforms or various sludgy grey-brown-greens, for instance. This slice of the palette can be found swirling around a squeegee kid's bucket or on many a factory floor.

Up close, Hinchley's painting looks like something to scrub with Vim, vigorously. Defying logic, it appears formless. But step back, WAY back, and like some age-old fundamental mathematical formula, emerging from a sea of random numerical chaos, the image asserts itself. There's ne'er a blob, daub nor a mark out of place. (Incredibly, he never wears his glasses when he paints.) Yet somehow, for all the heavy paint, Hinchley achieves a sense of the ephemeral, transitory and eternal in urban life, without losing any of its gritty metropolitan feel. Void of people, for instance, his images offer us only inanimate objects as evidence of our existence - electric lights, buildings, roads.

It's perhaps unusual for a contemporary realist, painting landscapes, landscapes of the city en plus, to use this technique, one that underpins so much abstract expressionism. Without getting his nose stuck in the air at a higher angle, Hinchley pulls it off like it's the way we've always seen the city. Overexposed as we all are to photographic imagery, especially photographs of the city, it's a shock to realize how Hinchley's paintings are documentary of something beyond facts and beyond possibly identifiable locations. They proffer truth about the city that photographs can only hint at. Partially this is due to contemporary photographic imageries' obsession with producing all the planes in an image in sharp focus. With notable exceptions, this has become particularly the case in advertising. (This is not how the human eye sees. Our eyes adjust to focus on each plane as we look at it, leaving those significantly in front or behind it out of focus. The controversy over which kind of reproduction—all sharp or with bits out of focus - best reproduces the way humans see has been raging on in photographic circles since the birth of medium itself.)

Like some ancient cartographer, adrift near the coast of an unknown shore, Hinchley' founds his work on meticulous, precise, and direct observation, transcribed. Yet, unlike the mapmaker, Hinchley knows this territory like the multi-coloured smears plastered all over his pale hands. Most of it falls within a block of his home.

"I'd say it's a painter's tradition really," says Hinchley. "Emily Carr, Tom Tomson, David Milne—they were engrossed in their environment. It's a Canadian tradition to paint what's close to you. The passion that these artists have really gets me charged."

"If I'm painting in my studio (at home), if I'm working over the paint that's already there, it is based on what I've already observed," on the street, he adds. "Basically what's on the board as I'm painting, offers me the possibilities to push it further. That's when the painting becomes about the paint."